Hello.

This is the online portfolio of Jehan Abon.

My areas of expertise are visual design, interaction design, and information architecture with experience in user research and user experience design.

With a consciousness for grids, structure, and typography, simplicity and clarity is what I aim for when designing, making things easier for people to use and understand. I believe things should be intuitive, attractive and simple to use.

Keynote presentation for Columbia’s Admissions counselors This is a video of the keynote presentation I redesigned for the Admissions office at Columbia. This presentation is used by Admissions counselors and presented to prospective students and their parents.

Admissions Keynote Presentation

Keynote presentation for Columbia’s Admissions counselors

This is a video of the keynote presentation I redesigned for the Admissions office at Columbia. This presentation is used by Admissions counselors and presented to prospective students and their parents.

Columbia Annual Report Websites

Annual report websites for Columbia College Chicago

Having moved the annual report from print to web, Columbia wanted to “tell their story” in a much more impactful way with both a compilation of student, faculty, and alumni stories and rich video content. Below are links to the online annual reports that I’ve designed:

Harris Theater for Music and Dance

Advertising and marketing materials for this premier performance entity in Chicago

The Harris Theater for Music and Dance is a premier performing arts venue located in Millennium Park. The Harris hosts world-renowned national and international artists and ensembles. I design a variety of pieces for the Harris including performance advertisements, bi-annual newsletters, environmental graphics and signage, email communications, and a variety of other pieces in support of their marketing and development/fundraising efforts.

UFVA Conference

The project scope was to create an identity for the University Film & Video Association’s 2012 conference to be hosted in Chicago by Columbia College Chicago.

This project presented a unique challenge in that the client for this project wanted to create an identity that could translate well from print, screen, and environmental applications. The client wanted to also reflect the specific theme for the conference:

Imagination is the 21st century technology.

The final product was based on modular components designed in an isometric grid to reflect technology and structure. The modules are intended to create several variations of a logo, however maintaining a single identity with a consistent type treatment and the repetition on shapes and color to signify “imagination” and creativity.

Oasis Therapy

An identity and website for a physical therapy start-up company.

Oasis Therapy is a start-up staffing company for physical therapists. The client needed a new identity, establishing a professional and reliable image and reputation. I designed a logo, business card, form templates, and a website which I also developed.

HG Girl On Fire

HG Girl on Fire is a fan website for the Hunger Games trilogy

This project was a really fun project to work on. I was introduced to the Hunger Games books by the client who was an avid fan of the books. Knowing that casting for the film series would begin, she wanted to create a fan website before much buzz about the film and celebrities started building up since there were only a handful of Hunger Games fan sites that existed at the time.

I created an identity based on the client’s preference for the artwork from the second book in the series. I then designed and developed a WordPress theme so that the team of bloggers would be able to easily and independently post their stories. We carried that identity over to social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.

HGGirlOnFire.com is now one of the official Lionsgate fan websites for the upcoming March 23, 2012 release of the first installment of the film series, The Hunger Games.

Interdisciplinary Arts Website

The Interdisciplinary Arts department is an academic department that offers graduate programs at Columbia College Chicago. The Center for Book & Paper Arts is part of the Interdisciplinary Arts Department at Columbia, and in addition to housing both graduate and undergraduate classes for that department, it publishes a critical journal and artists’ books, mounts exhibitions, hosts artist residencies, and offers public programming and workshops.

The project was a challenging project from the beginning due to the structure of the two different entities. Because there was shared programming and curriculum, they wanted to somehow avoid duplicating content by having separate websites and share content resources yet offer enough flexibility in the design and structure of the website in order to establish a clear distinction from their different initiatives.

The idea was to present both entities under the umbrella of the Interdisciplinary Arts department, determine the shared content areas of the website, and then establish two separate sections under the umbrella website for the unique content from the academic side and the community/research side.

We began the process by meeting with the clients to determine their goals and needs for the website. After these interviews, an initial sitemap was created to visually represent the information architecture of the website, how the content would be organized, shared, and maintained. Wireframes for top-level pages were also created to give the client a better understanding of how the structure of the site accomplished their goals for the website and a better understanding of the user experience.

The end result was a clean design with that showcased the art being created or exhibited in both the Interdisciplinary Arts Department and the Center for Book & Paper Arts.

Architecture of Resignation

The Architecture of Resignation is an art photography book published by the Center of American Places.

Architecture of Resignation, Photographs from the Mezzogiorno is an art photography book by Jay Wolke who photographed in the south of Italy. The book was published under Center for American Places which is the publishing entity at Columbia College Chicago.

The cover features a photo of an abandoned hilltop WWII bunker in the south of Italy with a spot varnish on the word “resignation” which gradates in and out of the image. The book cloth is a rich brown with a gold foil stamp for the title of the book.

The Rockabillies

The Rockabillies is an art photography book by Jennifer Greenburg. The book was published under Center for American Places which is the publishing entity at Columbia College Chicago.

Greenburg spent ten years traveling around the United States befriending and photographing members of a unique American subculture. The individuals portrayed are not actors, but rather contemporary participants of Rockabilly culture who have co-opted the looks and values of mid-twentieth century America.

Let’s Step Back and Start Simplifying Things

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing), adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters. Type design is a closely related craft, which some consider distinct and others a part of typography; most typographers do not design typefaces, and some type designers do not consider themselves typographers. In modern times, typography has been put into motion—in film, television and online broadcasts—to add emotion to mass communication.

The essential criterion of type identity was met by medieval print artifacts such as the Latin Pruefening Abbey inscription of 1119 that was created by the same technique as the Phaistos disc. The silver altarpiece of patriarch Pellegrinus II (1195−1204) in the cathedral of Cividale was printed with individual letter punches. The same printing technique can apparently be found in 10th to 12th century Byzantine reliquaries. Individual letter tiles where the words are formed by assembling single letter tiles in the desired order were reasonably widespread in medieval Northern Europe.

Modern movable type, along with the mechanical printing press, was invented in mid-15th century Germany by the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg. His type pieces from a lead-based alloy suited printing purposes so well that the alloy is still used today. Gutenberg developed specialized techniques for casting and combining cheap copies of letter punches in the vast quantities required to print multiple copies of texts. This technical breakthrough was instrumental in starting the Printing Revolution.

The Quick Brown Fox Ate Some Skittles

Blockquote

Those of us that had been up all night were in no mood for coffee and donuts, we wanted strong drink. We were, after all, the absolute cream of the national sporting press.

Image Styling

Image Aligned Right

Images may be two-dimensional, such as a photograph, screen display, and as well as a three-dimensional, such as a statue or hologram. They may be captured by optical devices–such as cameras, mirrors, lenses, telescopes, microscopes, etc. and natural objects and phenomena, such as the human eye or water surfaces.

The word image is also used in the broader sense of any two-dimensional figure such as a map, a graph, a pie chart, or an abstract painting. In this wider sense, images can also be rendered manually, such as by drawing, painting, carving, rendered automatically by printing or computer graphics technology, or developed by a combination of methods, especially in a pseudo-photograph.

Image Aligned Left

A volatile image is one that exists only for a short period of time. This may be a reflection of an object by a mirror, a projection of a camera obscura, or a scene displayed on a cathode ray tube. A fixed image, also called a hard copy, is one that has been recorded on a material object, such as paper or textile by photography or digital processes. A mental image exists in an individual’s mind: something one remembers or imagines. The subject of an image need not be real; it may be an abstract concept, such as a graph, function, or “imaginary” entity.